A Wrong Turn
by AutumnAtMidnite
Summary: While on the trail of two notorious jewel thieves who have purloined an ancient Egyptian artifact, Watson gives new meaning to the phrase 'taking a wrong turn'. Holmes is not amused.


******A/N:** This is just something I was tinkering around with to break a writer's block, and hoo boy, did it ever pour out of my fingers. This is a crossover of sorts with an Edgar Allan Poe character/world, however there is no need to have read Poe's original story to understand this fic, which can be read as a standalone, though I may continue with it. Virtual cookies to anyone who deduces the identity of the two thieves mentioned in passing :)

**A/N #2:**For the time being, this is only posted on my account, as I am currently experiencing ongoing technical difficulties with LJ.

**Warning(s):** Crackiness ahoy! Thar be time travel and sci-fi elements within.

* * *

"I trust you are quite pleased with yourself, Doctor." Holmes snapped shut his pocket watch, hawkish features silhouetted under the warm glow of a gas lamp.

"Well," said I, a trace of asperity leaking into my words, for I was beginning to feel a trifle nettled with his callous treatment of me since our impromptu arrival in this netherworld of filth and depravity, "I _did_ discover how that pair of jewel thieves have been eluding the law."

"Indeed," he drawled in a tone I did not over-much care for. "And now that we have arrived in this veritable Garden of Eden, sans custody of our elusive cracksmen, what is it you propose we do?"

"I had not thought of that," said I, crossing my arms to convey the state of my displeasure.

Holmes huffed a vague noise of irritation. "To the logician -" he began in that tone which suggested he was on the verge of subjecting me to a lecture, when his gaze abruptly latched onto something in the distance. As for myself, I could see naught but peddlers hawking their wares in the begrimed streets, an assortment of shady characters all but licking their chops at the gentlemanly visage we presented - no doubt mentally counting the notes in our pocketbooks - and fallen women advertising their business in the most brazen of manners.

Put out as I was with my companion's accusations of ineptitude concerned with our investigations into the matter of Lord Ravensley's purloined solid gold statue of Bastet, which dated back to the reign of the Pharaoh Djoser, and was speculated to be of greater worth than was the entire treasury of our own good sovereign, I was nonetheless disinclined to abandon Holmes in his exploration of this veritable wasteland. Our mysterious destination certainly appeared to my mind more noxious than was our sitting room at dawn - after my fellow lodger had spent the night mulling over some abstruse problem - with its smokestacks hacking a stygian ash which settled over the begrimed streets like some dark, malevolent entity. Not knowing what devilish corner of the world we had somehow been transported to, or what horrors awaited us therein, with one final glance at my defective timepiece (for since our arrival both our watches were seized with intermittent bouts of erratic counterclockwise spinning), hurried off to pursue the great detective as he drifted into the consuming miasma.

I caught up with Holmes as he was rounding the corner, and if I am to inject in this account a modicum of honesty, felt no little apprehension at the prospect of facing him, as the fault of our predicament, I suppose, did rightly belong on my shoulders.

Eager to prove that I might prevail where Sherlock Holmes had systematically failed to track down the perfidious housebreakers we sought, when the inquiries he sent me off on led to a breakthrough in the murk this case had been, I summarily followed that trail of breadcrumbs to a watchmaker's shop in Rotherhithe, where a duo of gentlemen with a roguish appearance about them were entering the quarters above the humble shop.

I fled up the staircase after them to the heated protestations of the proprietor, whereupon, to my great dismay, I discovered when I burst through the door that our two birds had flown. The situation was, for all purposes, a study in impossibilities, yet when one eliminates the impossible...

I was convinced the stooped old codger tinkering with the gears of a queer brass clock shaped in the fashion of a sundial and enumerated with Egyptian hieroglyphs in lieu of numerals, knew a great deal more of their whereabouts than he was letting on. Having returned to his position behind a ramshackle table in the corner, littered with the parts of innumerable dissected gadgets, he offered only a mischievous smirk whilst I dispensed upon him a litany of oaths that otherwise should have given me cause to blush. When he did deign to respond to my tirade, it was only to inform me his lodgers had repaired to their room.

Finally, after disclosing to the mealy-mouthed lout my identity, and in so doing, that of my illustrious friend, and threatening to bring down the entirety of Scotland Yard upon his dubious establishment, I was able to ascertain our men escaped through a secret passage. Of sorts. When I pressed him to elucidate further, it was with a malevolent upturn of his cracked lips that he slid the curious sundial across the counter.

As I made to inspect the thing, the old devil caught me by the wrist.

"Turn this 'ere dial just so, guv," said he in a voiced that matched his weather-beaten visage. "Thrice clockwise, seven times counterclockwise, and mind so as not to pass the scarab," he gestured with a gnarled finger at the indicated symbol, "or else like as not, it'll be the last thing you ever do."

Scoffing at the obviously superstitious fellow's warnings, I returned with the device to Baker Street, assuming it to be some key that would unlock any hidden chambers the thieving pair might have secreted themselves away in, for where I could not gain entry, my perceptive friend certainly could.

Holmes, however, had greeted the diminutive contraption with a raised eyebrow and the suggestion I make those arrangements for that holiday to Brighton I was so intent to go on, though how on earth he could have deduced my most recent plans to drag him off to the seaside were beyond my ken. In my desire to show my friend that his decision to allow me so substantial a role in scenting out the blackguards was not an overestimation of my abilities, I placed the clockwork device on his desk and proceeded to turn the dial.

And may have inadvertently passed the scarab.

I cannot say for certain. There was an almighty clamour, and blue sparks burst forth from the apparatus. Holmes instantly leapt from his chair to pry the incendiary device from my hand, which had become fixed to the sundial as though I were receiving jolts of electricity. The next I can recall, we had been displaced from our sitting room to this dismal world - minus the very device which transported us here!

Of course, my friend had at first been rather intrigued by this novel experience, that is until the realisation came that the elusive criminals yet again managed to slip through our fingers despite the confirmation our Egyptian sundial was, in fact, a viable means by which they had escaped.

"Hallo," Holmes murmured once I had swallowed enough of my pride to take my place beside him, those recriminations of my investigative methods momentarily forgotten, and sounding nearer to awe than I should ever have credited him with as he gazed up at a begrimed street sign.

"Have you deduced our whereabouts?" I ventured.

"Yes… and no. It really is quite impossible, though apparently, not altogether improbable," said he in his familiar maddeningly cryptic way. "Ha! Come, Watson. We shall see if my inferences are sound."

Navigating the streets as though he traversed them habitually, we soon found ourselves in a narrow alley which led to an open, nigh on intolerably congested courtyard. It was paved with cobblestones of a type that were done away with in London some fifty years prior, the poisonous vapours in the air more concentrated than any I'd ever the displeasure of inhaling in our worst pea soupers. Even in its unaccountably squalid state, this place we stood in was undoubtedly the Palais Royal in Paris.

And yet, it could not be.

Only months ago had I visited the French capital for a medical conference, and so vastly different was this than that other Paris, they might as well have been different cities entirely.

"Holmes!" I cried, "how can this be?"

A long moment passed in silence, wherein my friend was lost in the thrall of his own cogitations. That vacant expression of the daydreamer which signified his deepest ruminations gave Holmes the appearance of one in some oblivious stupor, but to I who knew him so well, was confident this could only signify he was puzzling out the solution to our conundrum.

Twilight was rapidly shrouding the city in its dark embrace, and if this truly was Paris, or some simulacrum of it, I began to comprehend the appeal it held for my literary progenitors, who in their despair were drawn to her Gothic allure like moths to a flame. An ambiance of gloom hung over this place like a funerary pall, invoking in the very recesses of my soul every bleak thought and sorrowful memory that ever inhabited it. When my gaze alighted on the grotesque shape of a gargoyle carved in stone on the façade of the building directly ahead, I could not supress a shudder.

"I quite agree. For those true _littérateurs _who appreciate the Night for all her morbid appeal, Paris is like the finest of wines to the palate."

"My dear fellow," said I, chuckling softly, "you astonish me. To think - good heavens!" The cry had been drawn from me once I came to be aware that the man standing at my shoulder was not Holmes, but some pallid Frenchman bedecked in the attire of a theatre-goer. His gaunt countenance, dark hair, startling blue-grey eyes apparent when once he removed a pair of singular green spectacles, and indeed, even the strident intonation of his (admittedly Gallic accented) voice, had a more substantial effect on me than did his trick of breaking into my thoughts, for he presented a remarkable, though to my mind a pale, intimation of Sherlock Holmes.

"Ah, a man's very expression is a window to the soul, _Monsieur_," the young stranger responded to my countenance of perfect astonishment rather than any query I had voiced, "and with the minutest of gestures, we betray our innermost thoughts, which, to the acute observer, become opaque as glass."

"But this is not possible," said I, incredulously.

Holmes, meanwhile, was duly roused from his cogitations to scowl menacingly at this thought perusing interloper.

Misreading my wonder as merely pertaining to the uncanny precision of his conclusions, the stranger dismissed it with a languid wave. "What you credit as being beyond the bounds of feasibility can be explained outside the realm of the supernatural by the process of ratiocination and observation. I was easily able to note you are a man of words by the ink stain on your cuff and the placement of your finger's callouses. That your eye did not flash over our marvels of architecture, so much as drink them in, gave me the impression your thoughts had wandered to your _métier_. Yet, the shudder this scene aroused in you confirmed Darkness held no appeal to your personal tastes, enabling me to infer the nature of your thoughts leant more towards that seductive appeal Paris is renowned for to those of us with a creative turn, who've within them an appreciation for the Night.

"An amusingly simple method to entertain the intellect, and a blessed distraction from _l'ennui de l'existence_. It was also, I may add, the very one by which I ascertained you are travellers through the corridors of time."

I stood in open mouthed incredulity. Holmes, however, who appeared rather less impressed with these mind reading theatrics than I, stepped forward to inquire whose acquaintance we'd the pleasure of making.

The stranger gave a modest bow. "Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, at your service, _mon cher voyageurs_."

* * *

_**To Be continued...?**_


End file.
